I do not remember your #3. In my part of the country it was quite the opposite, it was a period of optimism. And Eisenhower made the Interstate Highway system of roads possible. So, he wasn’t exactly a do nothing president. As far as the 60’s go, it was Kennedy who set the stage for civil unrest in the 60’s, and then Johnson who made everything else worse. We should never have been involved with Vietnam. Approx. 60,000 of our young men killed hundreds of thousands wounded physically or mentally. Maybe for you the times were different, but for me and those in my neighborhood the 50’s were good times. The 60’s were a mixed bag.
Certainly, you remember "This is a test! This is only a test! If this were a real emergency, you would be instructed to ...". You probably also remember those small triangles on the AM radio dial, marking the CONALRAD frequencies. These were examples of how seriously the prospect of nuclear bombardment was taken in the '50s. It was a time of opposites. Yes, there was optimism that we would all live in a Jetson's future with rocket cars and enjoy a cure for any disease. At the same time, we built fallout shelters, and post-apocalyptic dramas like On the Beach (1959) were taken as sagely prophetic.
One of the most interesting shifts in our popular thought occurring in the '50s was the skepticism which arose concerning science. This was directly related to the atomic bomb, which although it ended WW2, was generally seen as a great threat now that other countries had it. Consider, for example, the 1934 film Things to Come in which science defeats barbarism and elevates mankind. Now, compare that with Howard Hawks' The Thing (1951) where the pursuit of science is characterized as dangerous, destructive, and anti-social. Note that the scientist foil - who wears a goatee and is clearly foreign - in The Thing is willing to endanger everyone's life in pursuit of pure science. Where once we trusted science and scientists completely, in the '50s the wheel was turning and we had a more skeptical view of its benefits.